Contract Overload, part 3: OFPP ready to set tone for the future of MACs.

WFED's Jason Miller

The Office of Federal Procurement Policy finally looks
poised to do something about the proliferation of multiple
award contracts.

After five years of issuing guidance, best practices and
talking about reining in the wild west of contracting,
OFPP administrator Dan Gordon will signal his intentions
in a matter of weeks.

Industry sources say Gordon will decide by the end of May
whether to renew National Institute of Health's ability to
run a governmentwide acquisition contract therefore either
letting them proceed in awarding CIO-SP3 or requiring the
current version to expire in December.

In fact, Gordon will host a "listening-only" session May
26 with Council of Defense and Space Industry Associations
where some industry sources say he will announce his NIH
decision.

Even if he waits a few more weeks, Gordon says the
decision to let NIH proceed with CIO-SP3 must be made in
short order.

Industry sources say whatever he decides also will
indicate how he wants to proceed over the next year or so
with the more broad problems with multiple award
contracting.

Gordon has been on a listening tour for the past few
months, talking to industry, agencies, member of Congress
and just about anyone else who has an interest in
addressing the ever-growing number of MACs.

"I want to make sure we hear from people with different
points of view about the advantages and disadvantages of
having all of these multiple award contracts," Gordon says
in an interview with Federal News Radio. "I think I could
point to a couple of trends that emerged from our
discussions: one is for industry in particular that having
so many contracts that are essentially covering the same
goods and services is adding to their bid and proposal
costs in a way seems to them be unjustified. At the other
end of the spectrum, people agree that to going back to
mandatory use of the General Services Administration the
way it was 20 years ago is not appropriate."

He says agencies must find a happy medium between having a
100 similar or even duplicative contracts that are
wasteful to vendors and not helpful for the government,
and having just one contract provider.

Gordon says OFPP's listening tour eventually will shape
new policy to control the numbers of and the costs for the
ever increasing multiple award contracts.

"There are broader procurement policy questions we want to
think about," he says. "I would doubt this will lead to a
need for statutory changes, but more likely a change in
policy. How many GWACs we should have? How many
interagency contracts should we have? And whether agencies
should have agency specific contracts?"

These are similar questions industry and others experts
are asking.

"There is overlap, but is there enough overlap to say we
don't need multiple contracts?" asks Alan Chvotkin, senior
vice president at the Professional Services Council, an
industry association. "Part of that goes to work itself.
Take the Air Force, which has their computer program run
out of Gunter Air Force Base. Could that work be
accomplished through other vehicles? The answer is
probably so. So it really calls into question why does the
Air Force or any agency go down path of own contract
vehicles?"

He says there are no disincentives for agencies to create
their own contracts.

Chvotkin says OFPP could make a few changes that would
help, starting with creating an inventory of all the GWACs
and MACs.

This would lead to the second thing, which is requiring
agencies to see what other contracts currently exist to
see if it fits their needs before creating a new one.

Gordon says OFPP eventually will create a GWAC and MAC
database, but he has not yet put out a data call to
agencies.

Another suggestion is to give OFPP the approval authority
for all MACs along with the authority they already have
for GWACs, says Molly Wilkinson, minority counsel for the
Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee.

"OFPP has to take a holistic look and say, 'How is this
operating?' 'How did this get approved?' 'Why did these
move forward?' 'Why did we do this?'" says Wilkinson
during a recent conference sponsored by the Coalition for
Government Procurement. "You've got a shrinking
acquisition workforce and these cost money to contractors
to prepare bid and proposals that get passed back to the
taxpayer. It just makes no sense."

Scott Amey, counsel for the Project on Government
Oversight, agrees that someone needs to play traffic cop.